Various parties involved into interactions related to the health care need to exchange documents. Very often it is more efficient to do it when the documents are in electronic form (computer files, records in a database, etc.). However nowadays a large number of these transactions are done in non-secure ways, by means of passing to each other media with non-encrypted files, sending non-encrypted files attached to email, placing non-encrypted files on corporate or even public ftp servers. Such actions violate HIPAA requirements.
There are several known solutions including: For example, files are encrypted on the sender side and sent by email or delivered on a file storing media. Recipient must have a special program to decrypt it. While this works well between often collaborating parties this does not work for interactions between rarely communicating parties (i.e., Doctors and Patients) because they do not spend their efforts to set up safe communication protocols and applications in advance. In addition, there are several methods for online collaboration in the internet. A sender party uploads documents as files to a server where these files are stored. When uploading the document the sender defines a recipient email and the recipient receives email notification with the link to the document. The file is accessible by recipient via the link presented in the notification. Security of these interactions is achieved by: 1.) using secure communication protocols (i.e., SSL) between user side and server side applications; 2.) storing documents on the server as encrypted files; 3.) protecting access to the server by password and/or second factor authentication means; and 4.) automatically deleting a document on the server after preliminary set or configurable expiration period.
These solutions support basic and universal features for simple collaboration over the internet. In many cases desirable collaboration scenarios can be different depending on the specific industry vertical in which the collaboration happens, and the types of the involved users. This is not achievable by the described existing services. This problem is resolved by providing application programming interfaces for integration with an industry specific 3rd party corporate system. In this case user types and appropriate collaboration scenarios are defined in these corporate systems and the service stays industry neutral. This approach, however, can be quite expensive and not applicable for small businesses.
The present invention provides methods to build similarly functioning systems such that they are more adjustable for different industry verticals and different collaboration scenarios. The goal is to make secure online collaboration platforms that are more convenient and attractive to the user.